The first call came in at 6:12 p.m
“Gunshots at Trump rally,” a female voice exclaims. “Gunshots —”
“Yes,” the paramedic interrupted. “The police are on their way.”
“Come over here quickly!”
After that 15-second phone call, a barrage of others poured into the Butler County 911 communications center over the next 35 minutes, with some hearing cries of panic in the background amid the chaos surrounding the near-miss attempt on former President Donald Trump at an outdoor campaign rally.
“We’re at the Trump meeting and there’s a man shooting,” a breathless woman shouted seconds later. “He shot up the place.”
“The Butler Fair is in turmoil,” another female caller reported.
The fifteen audio recordings of more than a dozen calls are the first 911 communications publicly released since the July 13 assassination attempt at the fairgrounds in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
The recordings — received by local emergency responders shortly after the shooting — were made public Wednesday by Butler County as part of a legal settlement with NBC News and two other news organizations. The media filed a lawsuit over the recordings last month after the county initially denied their public records requests for them.
The shooting by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore, 50, and seriously injured Jim Copenhaver, 74, and David Dutch, 57. Trump’s right ear was also bloodied in front of a group of secret agents. Service officers hurried him off the stage and away from the scene. After the shots rang out, a Secret Service sniper quickly shot and killed the shooter.
But exactly how the gunman managed to climb onto a roof less than 200 yards from Trump with an AR-style assault rifle and fire eight shots at the then presumptive Republican presidential nominee sparked multiple investigations into the Secret Service and its preparations for the event. . It also led to the resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle just ten days after the incident.
Findings from separate investigations into what went wrong, released this month in several reports — including an independent review by a four-member panel of law enforcement officials appointed by President Joe Biden, and an interim report by a bipartisan congressional task force — cited numerous systemic failures, glitches and other failures in Secret Service planning and communications with local law enforcement agencies that secured the event.
Secret Service agents later in September thwarted a second apparent assassination attempt on Trump at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. And this month, Trump returned to the site of the first attempt on his life, holding another rally at the outdoor site, amid heightened security and behind bulletproof glass.
In the aftermath of the Butler rally shooting, local agencies released some police body camera footage, but none of the recordings of 911 calls surrounding the incident had been made public before Wednesday.
The 15 recordings, covering a period after the shooting from 6:12 p.m. to 6:47 p.m., captured panicked callers calling from the meeting and others who were not there but had received calls from their loved ones there.
In one of the calls, a dispatcher in neighboring Allegheny County transferred a woman who reported that her husband had been shot at the gathering.
“The paramedics helped him,” the woman said. “I called Butler Hospital. He’s not there. They told me to call 911.”
On another call, about ten minutes after the shooting, a man calmly asked for a paramedic.
“A lady fainted,” he said. “There was a shot.”
After explaining that the woman was in “the green section,” the man told the dispatcher, “They just tried to kill President Trump.” You might want to make a note of that. Thank you.”
One of the calls came from a man who said he was calling from North Carolina to report that his mother had just called him from the meeting.
“She called me to say there’s an active shooter on the ground there,” he said.
In another call, transferred to Butler 911 from an unknown jurisdiction, a woman with a shaking voice reported that her mother had called her from the meeting and said, “There are some people on the ground and she’s screaming . . .”
“Yes, the police are here, they are taking care of the situation,” a dispatcher assured her.
“What should I do?” she asked.
“The police are monitoring the situation. If they can evacuate the area there, the police will get people out of there.”
“Okay,” she said. “OK. OK.”
After the shooting, Butler County officials initially denied public records requests from news outlets, citing a provision in the state’s Right to Know Law that generally exempts 911 calls from public disclosure. NBC News, Scripps News and The Intercept each filed a lawsuit under a section of the law that gives public agencies the discretion to make such data public when “the public interest favoring access outweighs any individual, agency or public interest that may promote the restriction of access.”
In the petition to the court, attorney Joy Ramsingh, who represented NBC News and the other news agencies, said that “it is difficult to fathom a case in which the public interest in disclosure is more apparent given the political, historical and national significance of this assassination attempt. .”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
